“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. ” By Albert Einstein

OpenEd has recently released a new FREE Google Doc Add On called Lesson Plan Tool For Docs. It is an add on tool built into Google documents that pops up on the right hand side (similar to how the research feature works on Google documents) that allows you to add resources to your lesson plans. You can search for K-12 resources from opened.com which makes it simple to integrate into your document. OpenED has videos, games, assessments and more all aligned to common core standards.

You can find resources that are aligned to standards, two different ways. One way is by using the search box. Input a standard that you need resources for such as 5.NF.1 and the aligned resources will appear below. The second way is to select a standard drop down and navigate to the standard you are looking for. Teachers can obviously use this tool to build lesson plans, units of study or curriculum maps but I would use it differently!

I would use this tool to build playlist or pathways for students by standard; very similar to how I have used Blendspace in the past. To create a Pathway (example below), where students have choice of what tasks they want to complete based on a particular standard; using the ‘Lesson Plan Add on Tool’ teachers can simply drag and drop resources to create some of the tasks for the pathways by standards. You can also use the assessments that are in OpenEd as checkpoints. This saves teachers time and allows them to stay within one platform (Google) plus it is easy to assign to Google Classroom as well.

Below are some articles and more information on Lesson Plan Tools for Google Docs: